Gordon who? Brown on the Battle BusPosted by Ian at 2 10 PM on Friday, April 9

In Watford, Gordon Brown is
on his first proper day on the campaign trail.

The PM has descended on the neat suburban house of
82-year-old Isobel Jordan to talk about crime and anti-social behaviour.

As the Labour Party’s gleaming battle bus (not as posh as
Nick Clegg’s, which has an office and everything), squeezes into the street, it
parks alongside an eight-foot-tall Vote Labour Poster.

MP Clare Ward is standing nervously outside, the second
Labour candidate today to be seen looking uncomfortable in a bright “New
Labour” era power suit.

The massive poster is the only sign of any support for
Labour in what looks like a working class enclave.

And that’s the worrying point for Labour. Life inside the
Labour Party’s election bubble feels a bit like life with William Hague in
2001.

Then, as Hague made his last desperate “Save the Pound”
pitch I stepped outside of a market hall in a small Yorkshire
town.

Shoppers were passing by, giving curious and rather hostile
glances at the Conservative Party staffers desperate to try to get them to come
and listen to William’s pleas for support.

In Watford, as the battle bus pulls a way a Labour Party
apparatchik prepares to take down the poster and within minutes there will be
no sign that the Prime Ministerial bandwagon was ever here.

And this trip – with its satellite trucks, armed protection
police and loyal campaigners bussed in, has not gained Gordon Brown a single
vote.

Former factory worker Maureen Titchener, 62, is leaning on
her wall opposite and looks unimpressed.

She told the News of the World: “These politicians go around
the country and turn up at the houses of their supporters.

“I’m sure they are being told what to say.

“Gordon Brown should be talking to the people who aren’t so
Labour orientated.”

After making her complaints plain, Maureen was quickly
ushered in for an audience with the PM.

But afterwards she was still waiting to be won over: “He
seems nice enough but you can’t make your mind up in 4 minutes.”

Tonight in Kirkcaldy, Brown will again be among his own kind
as he is re-adopted as their election candidate.

At the start of the election, Labour Party spin doctors said
the PM would spend the campaign out and about meeting as many ‘ordinary’ people
as possible.

If thuings carry on like the, the PM will spend the next
four weeks touring the country meeting lotxs of “ordinary people”, who will be
nice to him, and will almost certainly vote Labour on May 6.

But the millions who are struggling to make up their minds,
or have already decided it is time for a change are un likely to see more than
a fleeting glimpse of the man who wants to be given a chance to govern again.